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Saturday, 8 July 2017

India and Modi stand up for Israel (Sunday Guardian)

By M D Nalapat

The Jewish community has an affection for India and its people.

For
those who have tracked the 13-year trajectory of Chief Minister Modi in
Gujarat, it is safe to infer that for Narendra Modi, governance at the
Central level is not a 5-year, nor even a 10-year plan, but extends to
15 years. And that Modi must have worked out in his own mind a
performance milestone for each of those years. These calculations will
remain with him and not get fully revealed to anyone. Although of
course, milestones for the immediate next years may be shared with those
he has tasked with helping actualise them. This meticulous segmenting
of overall performance into time-bound stages may annoy those
well-wishers of Modi who wish to see fulfilled in Year 3 what the PM has
kept aside for Year 5, but such shows of impatience will not deflect
Modi from following his own timetable. The good news is that when he
finally delivers, the results usually will be worth the wait, as has
just happened in the case of the visit to Israel. This is a country that
the Prime Minister is known to admire, which is why several forecast a
Modi visit much earlier than towards the second half of the third year
of his current 5-year term as PM. But now that Modi has visited a
country that has assisted India in every conflict that our country has
been engaged in since 1962, it is clear that the structure of the visit
surpassed every early expectation of its depth and impact. Before
visiting Israel, Modi hosted the Chairperson of the Palestinian
Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, and in this context, hopefully India will soon
join those nations that have set up educational, health and other
facilities in the West Bank. Such a gesture would take place despite the
way in which Arab nations have, almost without exception, backed
Pakistan on Kashmir out of wholly communal considerations. The Pakistan
army is not interested in securing Kashmir for its own sake, but because
GHQ Rawalpindi is aware that a wrenching away of this beautiful corner
of India would result in a “nakba” (catastrophe) across the country that
would make the events of 1947-48 seem mild in comparison.

The State of Israel has indeed expanded
the 1948 boundaries given to it by the United Nations, but each time
this has been caused by its victory in a war begun by the other side to
try and increase the territory they themselves control. The leaders of
Israel being somewhat different in mindset from those in India, they
have mostly refused to lose at the peace table what the Israeli Defense
Forces won on the battlefield, with the exception of Sinai, which was
handed back to the Egyptians, and large parts of which have now become a
refuge for Al Qaeda, especially since the (fortunately brief) period in
office of a Muslim Brotherhood government in Cairo, which was set up
with the blessings of Hillary Clinton. The 1948 boundaries of Israel
were practically indefensible, and but for the fact that the armies
confronting Israel were adept only at shooting down their own
populations and not a foreign military, Israel may have either shrunk or
vanished altogether. In 1967, President Nasser thought that he could
repeat his Suez Canal triumph with a takeover of Israel, but failed, as
happened again in 1978 with Anwar Sadat. Since then, and partly because
of Israel’s nuclear capability, the Jewish state has not seen
conventional attacks on its territory, although non-conventional
(terror) attacks are unceasing. Whether they be in Tel Aviv or in New
York, the Jewish community has an affection for India and its people,
and among the ways in which this gets reflected is the partnership
between Jewish-American and Indian-American organisations in Washington.
Interestingly, while the classic faiths of Greece, Egypt and Rome faded
into nothingness, that of the Jewish and the Indic people survived
across millennia of persecution, as did another classic faith,
Zoroastrianism, although demography, combined with patriarchal and
outdated rules for admission into the fold, is resulting in this
fascinating faith shrinking its already tiny numbers at an accelerating
pace.

In the context of Prime Minister Modi’s
pathbreaking journey to Israel, BJP spokespersons, voluble about the
neglect by the Congress and its allies of one of India’s most loyal
friends, forget that there was little difference between the policies
towards Israel of the A.B. Vajpayee government and those pursued by
Manmohan Singh. Indeed, when the first India-Israel-US security
conference was organised at the IIC in Delhi in 2003, National Security
Advisor Brajesh Mishra worked hard to get it cancelled. Why? Because
such a meeting would in his reckoning “confirm fears of a
Christian-Jewish-Hindu alliance against Muslims”. This was among the
fantasies that Mishra was apparently prey to. Failing in his bid to
scrap the conference, Mishra tried to block meetings of the conference
participants with key policymakers of the Vajpayee government. To their
credit, several of the NDA leaders ignored such advice and went ahead
with the meetings, although in their residences rather than their
offices. These included Deputy PM L.K. Advani, Defence Minister George
Fernandes and HRD Minister M.M. Joshi, although Jaswant Singh kept aloof
in deference to the National Security Advisor. President A.P.J. Abdul
Kalam showed his mettle by going ahead with a meeting at the Rashtrapati
Bhavan with key members of the three delegations. As he later explained
privately, given the help Israel had given to India in the field of
security, his conscience did not permit him to cancel a courtesy meeting
with key India-Israel-US conference participants.

Friendship and loyalty are two-way
streets. They need to be given in order to be received. Prime Minister
Narendra Modi has, by his visit, shown in ample measure the gratitude of
the people of India towards a country and a people who have invariably
come to our assistance in times of crisis, thus far without any public
acknowledgement by India of the depth of the partnership. Bravo, and may
there soon be an encore.

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About Prof. M. D. Nalapat

Prof. Madhav Das Nalapat (aka MD Nalapat or Monu Nalapat), holds the UNESCO Peace Chair and is Director of the Department of Geopolitics at Manipal Academy of Higher Education, India. The former Coordinating Editor of the Times of India, he writes extensively on security, policy and international affairs. Prof. Nalapat has no formal role in government, although he is said to influence policy at the highest levels. @MD_Nalapat

MD Nalapat's anthology 'Indutva' (1999)

In 1999, Har-Anand published Indutva an anthology of MD Nalapat's 1990s columns from the Times of India. The individual columns are posted here, in 1998 and 1999 of the blog archive, though the exact dates of publication are uncertain.